Category: Top Video Lists

Video-blogging last month at CES was awesome. I've posted 75 videos filming with the ultra-high quality Panasonic GH3 camera on a Tiffen Steadicam Merlin 2 with vest and using the Kopin Golden-i 3.8 for augmented video-blogging. At the CES 2013, there were some significant ARM related announcements, demonstrations and releases. Here are some of my highlights:

1. Samsung announcing the Samsung Octa ARM Cortex-A15 and ARM Cortex-A7 big.LITTLE processor. (I didn't get to film any interviews about Samsung Octa yet, here's the 1-hour Samsung keynote) I did film the Samsung 2013 HDTV series (which features perhaps a latest newest ARM processor built-in for its smart tv and features)

I posted 767 videos from 17 tradeshows, with 6.8 Million views on my YouTube channel (increasing my total YouTube view count to 21.6 Million), thank you for your 8696 comments, 13826 Likes, thank you for reading my blog, watching my videos, commenting, rating, sending news tips and sharing! Thanks to my 12885 followers on Google+! Since August 2011, I post most of my tech opinions on my Google+. Here are some of my Highlights in ARM Powered devices that I blogged on ARMdevices.net in 2012:

2. Rockchip RK3066 Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 with Quad-core Mali-400 GPU. My Interview with Rockchip about RK3066. The initial benchmarks I've heard about on RK3066 place its performance very high. There are already a range of prototypes with RK3066 inside being shown by a whole range of Rockchip partners. Here are my first RK3066 videos: $128 10.1" 1280x800 by Alldocube, Pipo 10.1" and 9.7". Expect lots new RK3066 devices to be released quickly. The SoC and price difference between this and ARM Cortex-A8 solutions may make this one very popular even for cheap/affordable implementations out of China.

4. Rockchip RK2906 ARM Cortex-A8 without HDMI for cheap. As with the Boxchip A13 without HDMI, Rockchip now also releases a new lower cost ARM Cortex-A8 skew without HDMI called the RK2906. The thinking might be that many people in China and worldwide do not have a HDMI or do not need the HDMI output, so they may as well design the SoC without HDMI to save another $2-$5 on the bill of material for the device. I've found it in the $49 Rk2906 7" capacitive tablet by Sawink. Rockchip also launched the RK2908 (also featured in my Rockchip interview video) for cheaper ARM Cortex-A8 Set-top-boxes only.

Processors that I have not yet seen or noticed a lot of on this trip but who may have imminent devices that may quickly gain significant market share out of Shenzhen based device makers:

AmLogic announced their AML8726-MX Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 design. I think I've been hearing about a Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 coming from Telechips. But those can not yet be sighted at the fairs as far as I know.

A bit can be seen featuring the ST-Ericsson U8500 and low-cost skew U8410, I expect several more devices to be shown soon out of China featuring these. Also offering potentially great value Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 for smartphones and connected tablets. I think ST-Ericsson wants to position their Dual-core Cortex-A9 to compete with Single-core Cortex-A9 solutions.

Qualcomm seems to have upgraded the MSM7227 with skews that use the new faster ARM Cortex-A5 instead of the previous year's ARM11. I am not sure if I have noticed that on this trip. I get a bit confused as they still call it MSM7227 or MSM7225, they add a T or an A at the end, I forget which is the new Cortex-A5 design.

Telechips also has a new Cortex-A5 processor which I first saw in March at CeBIT in the Valueplus Tizzbird HDMI stick, but I am also not sure if I have seen any other devices on this trip using that yet.

Being able to borrow this setup for the past 2 months, among many other that I've been able to meet and demonstrate it to, this allowed me to meet Google co-founder Sergey Brin at CES 2012, Sebastian Thrun (Google X, Stanford Artificial Intelligence, Udacity, Inventor of the Google Self-driving Car) and Steve Lee (Manager of Google Maps for Mobile, Latitude and Google X), I was speaking with them for about 5 minutes!

I am really lucky to be one of the first few people in the world to be able experiment with this headmounted computer (they have manufactured less than 250 prototypes thus far). That caught the attention of Google co-founder Sergey Brin who approached me and asked me what it was! I got them to try some of the headmounted voice command software demos in the headset, talk about my $199 Archos 70b Internet Tablet with Honeycomb (and ICS later) which Archos claims to have nearly the third largest worldwide tablet market share with their 2 million Android tablets sold in 2011 (Sergey Brin knows Archos perfectly well it seems, Archos has been making Android tablets for over 2 years but has only gotten fully Google certified since using Honeycomb on their G9 tablet generation released 3 months ago).

Sergey Brin and his colleagues asked me if I thought headmounted monocular wearable computing was going to be big, I said yes of course. I consider it can be like the dashboard for ones life. Positionned a bit below the eye, it can provide augmented informations about your surroundings, display your emails, social media updates, search news alerts, chat messages and more, without the need to pull out your phone or tablet from your pocket. Of course for the mass market consumer audience, it needs to be nearly as compact as a bluetooth headset with a retractable micro-display and a priced below $500 to become an accessory interfacing by bluetooth to any Android phone or tablet. I expect this to start becoming huge later this year or soon after. Kopin is working with Motorola Solutions to mass manufacture an industrial version and they want to work on consumer oriented uses. I also expect wearable computing to become huge in the form of intelligent Android wrist watches such as the DVIP Phaeton and the I'm Watch (Casio GB 6900 G-Shock, Sony-Ericsson Liveview and Motorola Moto ACTV also qualify as early attempts)

2. E Ink provided me with a new demonstration of their latest technology in my E Ink On Every Smart Surface video. Featuring the 300DPI 11.5" E Ink screen, new high-speed stylus on E Ink demos (with the right collaborative text editing and collaborative stylus annotations software, this could be huge!), on devices like the Eton Rukus, E Ink for digital signage. All your local supermarkets may soon be using E Ink for showing prices in stores.

3. All Camcorder companies seem to wake up to the idea of including low power high performance WiFi streaming and upload into consumer camcorders. See my videos of the Sony Bloggie Live, Toshiba Camileo Air10, Canon HF M52. This is awesome! WiFi in camcorders has been on my wishlist of camcorder features since my post of August 2nd 2008 and my updated camcorder wish-list post of January 31st 2010. Finally the camcorder makers are waking up and differentiating! There still are a bunch of features that I would like from these camcorders. High-quality wireless (multi-Bluetooth) and wired external microphones support. 1080p recording and at the same time live WiFi video streaming, Google+ Hangouts live streaming video upload. Automatic resumable YouTube WiFi upload in between takes. Touch screens to edit Titles, Descriptions, Tags right from the camcorder. WiFi upload must be as fast as using a Laptop. But for sure they are on the right track! I'm looking forward to Panasonic's Sanyo HD3000 level entry into this market, hopefully with all these WiFi features and more!

6. OLPC XO-3 shown for the first time!, OLPC does it again, this time revolutionizing the use of tablets for education, pricing it below $100 for mass orders, building it sturdy, unbreakable, sunlight readable with a 8" Pixel Qi, with a solar charger in the screen cover.

7. ARM Powered Google TV has finally been launched! Featuring solutions shown using the Marvell Armada 1500 platform, Mediatek has an ARM Processor for it, LG showed their new ARM Powered Google TV L9 Processor and platform. Sony shows their second generation Google TV, now ARM Powered for cheaper/better and more revolutionary and awesome! I expect we'll hear about Samsung, Panasonic, Philips, Sharp, Toshiba all will announce ARM Powered Google TV within months from now. By the half of 2012, most new HDTVs will come with ARM Powered Google TV built-in by default! I also expect as soon as the ARM Powered Google TV software is open sourced that we'll see it run on cheaper ARM Processors that don't do 1080p60fps, overlays, IR blaster and HDMI input.

8. 4K HDTVs are comming! Yeah! 4K 55" HDTVs are always the most awesome demonstrations at trade shows and have been for the past 3-4 years! The arguments by supposed home theater experts that 4K is not usable in living rooms are not true! 4K is fantastic, fenomenal technology to have in the home! Just put your 8 megapixel pictures on an SD card, see those pictures on that 4K 55" HDTV, and be ready to faint, standing up close to the screen the quality is spectacular. Consumers and even professional photographers never get to see the full detail and resolution of their high megapixel photography. Unless you zoom in on pictures, you never get to see more than 2 megapixel of your pictures quality! With a 4K screen in your living room and that you can use as office desktop monitor, the 4K screens are going to be revolutionary. At CES 2012, Sharp claims their 4K-ICC 55" TV is to be mass manufactured and launched at consumer oriented pricing later this year! Samsung showed a totally awesome 70" 4K TV. I have a feeling that Sharp, Toshiba, Samsung and others are just about to launch 4K at hopefully way below $10 thousand, hopefully below $2000 soon! If it's going to be $1999, I recommend everyone save money to get one. As source, all Hollywood movies are already digitized to 4K and that can fit on a regular Blu-ray disc, streamed from YouTube 4K or over 50 4K movies can fit on a 2TB hard drive.

9. Panasonic launches consumer priced HC X900M camcorder with 4K video sensor! But still a 1080p engine for now. The 4K consumer priced camcorders must be very close! My JVC GC-PX10 also has a 4K video sensor! But mine with its Falconbrid 4K processor also is for now only setup to record it to a 1080p (up to 36mbitps) file.

12. iRiver Kibot, the small new robots are cool, basic stuff for now. Within 10-15 years we'll be having ARM Powered Robots take care of everything in our homes, washing dishes, take out the trash, cook the food, everything else!

13. 55" OLED screens shown by Samsung and LG. Those are cool for sure! But I expect they are way more expensive to manufacture than 4K LCD screens of the same size today.

15. New Samsung Galaxy S2 and Galaxy Note clones are invading China! Kente shows some examples. Consider that excellent 4.3" capacitive WVGA 3G-ready Android phones are being sold below $100 in China by now. Check back here on ARMdevices.net during the next few months for a lot of news and coverage on these. Also a cheap new Android phone design by ZTE.

17. The Huawei Ascend P1 and P1 S are awesome looking OMAP4460 1.5Ghz 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus 6.65mm thinnest Smartphone in the world. I think Huawei plans to be a huge player in the worldwide smartphones market. Look for this and much more awesome Huawei Android Smartphones coming out. Their main advantage may be their aggresively competitive pricing. If this phone is sold for $299 unlocked, who wouldn't buy it?

18. I did my first live Google+ Hangouts On Air from CES, but because of the interference I couldn't reliably do it at the CES show floor with my headmounted augmented video-blogging system. But I did it every morning on my way between my hotels and the CES showfloor in my series of CES 2012 Monorail Hangouts: 1, 2, 3. I hope to soon do much more impressive things with the Google+ Hangouts On Air features! Expect quality live and on-demand Hangout entertainment from my website at the level of the Hangouts with Barack Obama and Desmond Tutu!

I posted 573 videos from 15 tradeshows, with 7.1 Million views on my YouTube channel (doubling my total view count to 14.7 Million), thank you for your 7159 comments, 7397 Likes, thank you for reading my blog, watching my videos, commenting, rating, sending news tips and sharing! Thanks to my 4520 followers on Google+! Since August, I post most of my tech opinions on my Google+. Here are some of my Highlights in ARM Powered devices that I blogged on ARMdevices.net in 2011:

6. MG Siegler interview, I only had 2 minutes to ask him a few questions, I tried to ask him a few things about Google vs Apple. MG Siegler is probably one of the top most influential Apple fanboys on the web.

I just returned from 10 days video-blogging over 44 videos from Taiwan. Here's my list of my top-20 best Computex 2011 videos:

1. Pixel Qi launches 10.1″ super thin 1280×800 screen, their first showing of the 1280x800 resolution Pixel Qi screen to be mass manufactured in Q4, they also will mass produce 7" in Q3, and listen to this video for more talk by Mary Lou Jepsen on the latest status and news on Pixel Qi in the industry.

2. Latest e-ink e-reader news from Freescale, check out the new Android friendly i.MX508 that may be used in the new Nook and Kobo to also use Android as software basis for e-ink e-reader innovation. This video is also featuring the new Acoustic Pulse Recognition (APR) touch screen technology integrated in a prototype e-reader by Tyco Electronics.

3. ShiZhu Technology shows Pixel Qi Tablets, ShiZhu Technology is a big Chinese manufacturer, they can now mass produce Android Tablets with Pixel Qi screens. This video features comparisons of its matte Pixel Qi screen compared with the glossy Archos 70 Internet Tablet screen and with HTC flyer with a matte anti-reflective layer.

4. MHL now in several phones at Computex 2011, the MHL protocol for sending HDMI over Micro-USB is now not only on the best ever smartphone the Samsung Galaxy S2, it's also now in HTC Sensation, HTC Flyer, Evo 4G and Evo 3D phones and more to come.

5. The whole ARM Powered Tablet or Laptop with Pixel Qi screen can run on a relatively small and cheap $3 1W solar panel, Solar panels could be built-in to the bezel, on the back of tablets or laptops or on a flip-out screen protector to thus be able to power the whole tablet and laptop and charge its battery just from direct or indirect sunlight. This means children in Africa, India, other places with a lot of Sun but little power, could be getting Internet connected ARM Powered devices that can run just on sun power. Pixel Qi is able to demonstrate that this works, but they didn't have the time to set it up at Computex and the day I was there to film it was half-cloudy in Taipei (it had been raining some of the days during Computex) so perhaps not optimal for filming the actual demonstration. Pixel Qi could be releasing an official video showing pretty soon on their blog proving that this works today.

7. Cupp Computing turns every Laptop into an ARM Powered laptop with hard drive to SSD replacement module, this is really awesome, it means that all Intel/AMD x86 powered laptops can easily get added an ARM Processor to their motherboards, or added in replacement of the Hard Drive with an SSD, to provide every laptop with the option to run up to 40 hours on a battery on a button switch. Imagine if by a button switch you could automatically resume your x86 work in the ARM version of Windows, thus extending your battery runtime by 10x or more. This could be a great transitional solution from x86 to ARM for people not yet totally confortable with going away from x86.

14. Asus Memo, worlds first 7″ Honeycomb, Honeycomb looks great on 7", even with it only being optimized for larger 1280x800 screens for now. Maybe it is too bad that Asus only wants to sell this with a 3D screen and this expensive looking Bluetooth headset/remote control MiMic thing. I also filmed another 7" Honeycomb tablet, the Viewsonic 7x using Tegra2.

15. Samsung Origen, the new $199 Exynos 4210 development board, possibly the most powerful publicly released ARM Powered development board, to be sold for $199, featuring Samsung's latest Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with Mali-400 graphics, fast DDR3 RAM and other features of fast memory bandwidth.

17. ARM keynote at Computex 2011, Ian Drew is the Executive VP of Marketing at ARM, here's my recording of most of his keynote speech. Sorry for missing out the first 3 minutes in this video, and my audio volume is a bit low you have to turn up your playback volume to the maximum to hear things clearly enough.Q Which was fun to come right after the Intel keynote. A notable quote from this keynote is this part: "Multiple options is always better than one size fits all".

Following is my summary and my top-20 videos filmed during 10 days spent in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, at 3 tradeshows, filming, interviewing, uploading and posting 97 videos from the Shenzhen Electronics Fair (April 8-10th), China Sourcing Fair (April 12-15th) and HKTDC Electronics Fair (April 13-16th). With all those many videos posted, it can be hard for you to look through all of them to find out which are the best. That is why I now always summarise my best videos in a post in the Top Video Lists category. Many awesome new ARM Cortex-A9 tablets and cheap smartphones were shown.

New major ARM processor trends from the Shenzhen and Hong Kong tradeshows and markets:

Based on the overwhelming amount of new videos filmed related to those new processors, I added 3 new Chip provider categories to ARMdevices.net:

- AmLogic, I filmed 9 new videos: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9] (in order of most to least interesting), it's a new low-cost Single-Core Cortex-A9 processor, clocked at 800Mhz for now, it can be found in the first sub-$100 Cortex-A9 tablets (resistive). The performance of these are likely better than 1Ghz Cortex-A8, but I will test this on my Kinstone AmLogic tablet sample (that I bought for $130 (850 renminbi)) and report in my upcoming second part video-review soon.

- NEC/Renesas, I filmed 7 new videos: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7] (in order of most to least interesting), about 2 years ago, NEC Electronics and Renesas merged and out of that merger is coming this new NEC/Renesas EV2 ARM Cortex-A9 Dual-Core 533Mhz processor, the SoCs based on it are very low priced. Consider this to be the Japanese ARM Cortex-A9 Dual-Core entrant. Some of my reports claim that a nice capacitive tablet design based on this processor can be sold in bulk for as little as $110, $125 or $135. I bought a sample from Livall.cn for $171 which I will soon video-review further.

My top-20 best Shenzhen/HongKong April 2011 videos:

1. Archos 7c Home Tablet, RK2918 Capacitive, Archos are building amazing value tablets based on the Rockchip RK2918 ARM Cortex-A8 1.2Ghz processor, with great capacitive touch screens, and they are bringing that to the definitely sub-$200 price range. As I am probably the biggest Archos fanboy in the world (I'm the admin and founder of http://forum.archosfans.com), I found it super fascinating to meet their expert staff and visit their Shenzhen headquarters.

2. Arnova 10 capacitive RK2918 to be released in May, at possibly $229 MSRP, for this 10.1" capacitive Rockchip RK2918 ARM Cortex-A8 1.2Ghz tablet, it's hard to find better value 10" tablet. Consider this kind of price is for a product that will be massively available at all retail stores in Europe and the USA, that price is the retail price, including all import taxes, fees, margins and everything. I believe Archos can make huge sales of their new Arnova line, especially now that they are able to bring ARM Cortex-A8 performance and nice capacitive screens to these entry-level priced devices.

3. Best of Shenzhen: $87 Android 3.5″ capacitive phone, MTK6516 FG8, that is my initial video review of my new FG8 $87 Android Smartphone. Mediatek MTK6516 based, with Android 2.2 Froyo and a 3.5" HVGA Capacitive touch screen. This is amazing to see how cheap the Android smartphones are getting. Check back for my further video reviews coming up to show the performance and features of this cheap smartphone platform.

6. $95 Cortex-A9 Tablet Review, Kinstone KS-UMD070A9, my initial review of this sub-$100 (bulk, resistive) ARM Cortex-A9 AmLogic 800Mhz Single Core tablet. I've got the review sample right here, so I will post a further full video review with benchmarks, video codec tests and other speed tests as soon as I get the time, check back for that.

8. Archos at the Shenzhen Electronics Fair, not much news in this video, it's just interesting to see how Archos has a big booth at the Shenzhen Electronics Fair and uses it to do sales of their devices towards growing their sales in the Chinese mainland market.

17. Meizu M9, $380 Android phone with Retina Display, interesting to see a 3.5" Retina Display and the Samsung Hummingbird ARM Cortex-A8 1Ghz processor in this new Meizu M9 phone. At $380 unlocked it's expensive, but surely less expensive than an iPhone while having pretty similar hardware performance. Meizu has several stores in the Shenzhen electronics market area, they seem to be a relatively big smartphone brand in China.

On the 3rd of March, I jumped on a train from CeBIT Hannover to Embedded World in Nurnberg, so that I could try to interview the representatives of some of the cool ARM Powered devices shown there. I managed to film 15 videos during that day at Embedded World, here are my top-6 best videos:

3. $200 Tegra2 slim PC by Trim Slice Compulab, yet another cool looking Tegra2 powered super compact desktop PC, this one may actually seem to be more finalized than the Toradex, in terms of software and in terms of cheap motherboard design availability, though it's to be seen once it gets released what the status for software and hardware pricing will be then.

4. 4K2K video playback on the new Texas Instruments DaVinci DM816x and DM814x, the powers of Texas Instruments DaVinci ties in with what they do with OMAP, the DaVinci perhaps targetting more video-centric uses such as potentially one of the next $100 ARM Powered Google TV set-top-boxes. 4K2K ARM Powered Google TV at $100 retail would be awesome. Until then, the OMAP4 stuff is not yet in these DaVinci and the video stuff is not yet in OMAP4, but those are merging their powers.

5. Seco shows x86-ARM Cross Platform, they work on making it easy for the industry to get away from using x86 and to use ARM solutions instead. They support OMAP4, Tegra2, OMAP3 and i.MX51 designs among others. It becomes as easy as swapping the one for the other, all other aspects of the design, even the software being interoperable.

6. QNX talks about their software on the Blackberry Playbook, still no confirmation if Blackberry will choose to install a Dalvik Engine on top of this to support Android apps in there, but it's sure interesting to try to understand how QNX does it to utilize the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 Texas Instruments OMAP4430 processor to its fullest to provide the smoothest UI and multi-tasking.